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...remember when policemen were people you felt you could go up to and ask for directions?

No longer it seems. In fact, if you have anything like a map with you, you could find yourself staying at Belmarsh (warning, watching the whole of this may cause you to damage your computer in anger!):

H/T Tristan

I am so glad Terence was filming this. Everyone should get the chance to see this kind of thing and have a real good think about the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" attitude that is allowing our country to become a fascist state. The ability to stop at random (I was going to say "take to one side", but clearly they're happy to do this in full view of the entire concourse), with no probable cause whatever, and humiliate them in order to show other passengers "look, we're doing something about your security" is utterly obnoxious. I must say, though, I am amazed that he was allowed to continue filming, considering all that has been going on about photography in public places.

Britain, like never before, needs Fourth Amendment rights enshrined in law: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

On 1st August 1908 the Old Age Pensions Act completed its parliamentary stages, the first step in the development of the modern benefits and welfare system by Asquith's Liberal government and the culmination of several decades of debate and lobbying for some provision to be made for the "deserving" poor in their old age. An alternative to the Poor Laws. On 1st January 1909 half a million or so people over 70 years old became entitled to a 5 shillings a week non-contributory payment administered via the Post Office.

It was not universal; only 5% of people lived beyond 70 in any case - and most were women. It was kept deliberately quite low in order to encourage as many as possible to make their own savings arrangements to top it up.

The BBC has a useful little comparison of then and now pensions arrangements, and you can read the whole act here.

According to an article I dug up last year Lord Roseberry described the Act as the most important piece of legislation since the Great Reform Act of 1832.

I'll refrain from a rant about how it's been a hundred years of mostly Tory and Labour government since and we still have 20% of pensioners living in poverty and dependent on additional means tested benefits and how we can solve this by continuing the legacy of liberal economic reforms those pioneers started.  Let's just enjoy the birthday shall we?

Earlier this year the big fuss about cannabis was research that purported to show that it *caused* mental health problems. Or, more specifically, that amongst those people with a predisposition to schizophrenia and other serious mental health problems it somehow lit the fuse that was already prepared.

Then recently the same statistical evidence used to justify this claim was re-examined by another group of researchers who found a more plausible explanation was that people with such mental health problems actually tend to try to self-medicate as their illness progresses. So use of cannabis is the effect, not the cause, of those mental health problems.

Now the Independent reports that 50% of drug addicts and alcoholics (the same thing of course!) have mental health problems for which the drinking or addiction is often an attempt to self medicate and that many are being misdiagnosed because practitioners see the symptom, not the cause - the addiction, not the pre-existing mental illness.

The distinction is of course crucial...

The former research tells us that some natural substances that mankind has used apparently for as long as human history are the cause of terrible illnesses, parents blame the drugs and the drug dealers for their tragically damaged, sometimes terminally, children and the "war on drugs" has a powerful propaganda weapon.

The latter says that these drugs seem to offer some kind of relief for an often undiagnosed condition. Perhaps even that the medical wisdom of the ancients was quite sound. And that the "war on drugs" is possibly little more than a classic moral panic that has been doing more harm than good for the best part of a century.

I know which side I am on. The "war on drugs" leaves more casualties than the drugs themselves. It is that that is immoral. Way beyond the harm that a user of a properly regulated, non-criminal underworld market would suffer.

This interested me today:

Telegraph - Sharia law is spreading as authority wanes

By Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor

Islamic sharia law is gaining an increasing foothold in parts of Britain, a report claims.

Sharia, derived from several sources including the Koran, is applied to varying degrees in predominantly Muslim countries but it has no binding status in Britain.

However, the BBC Radio 4 programme Law in Action produced evidence yesterday that it was being used by some Muslims as an alternative to English criminal law. Aydarus Yusuf, 29, a youth worker from Somalia, recalled a stabbing case that was decided by an unofficial Somali "court" sitting in Woolwich, south-east London.

I expect we're supposed to be appalled. Yet I'm not. I don't see a problem with this idea. In fact it's a good deal more responsible a solution than meting out punishment beatings or kickings to the local scrotes on the say so of the local hard-man.

In fact, I quite like the idea that communities deal with many matters of justice on their own. As the report says, people submit to these courts because their families make them. Those families are shamed amongst their friends and the rest of their communities by their relatives' actions. The only stipulation I'd make is that no punishment should be imposed that would itself be a criminal offense under British law or that the "arrests" do not actually amount to kidnappings - if miscreants do not submit voluntarily to such local community justice.

It has always struck me, especially since the experience of accompanying a friend to a magistrates' court on a driving charge last year, that our good old British magistrate system is failing miserably in many places. They appear merely to be applying a regular slap on the wrist to a group of people, chief amongst them the hapless and hopeless, on behalf of an overburdened legal system. There's no sense, to me at least, that the magistrate system is reflecting the wishes and concerns of the communities they serve in any way that would assist in rehabilitation of relatively minor offenders or reconciliation with the communities they offend against.

But in terms of these Sharia courts, I don't see why we should get any more worked up about it than by, say, a Catholic Charismatic Renewal church that holds confessions in public, or the idea of church congregations "shunning" miscreants in some Christian sects. All our communities should be encouraged to find their own answers within the overall framework of the law to the sort of crimes against the community these courts are dealing with. Far better, say, than a broad brush "Anti-Social Behaviour Order" I'd say.

Gordon Brown was quite effusive, for him, over the sad (though at ninety seven one could never say untimely) passing of John Kenneth Galbraith.

Maybe he should read "Money: Whence it came, where it went".

If Galbraith did one thing, I would say it was to challenge the idea that economists have some monopoly on wisdom that ordinary folk were excluded from. Rather, he claimed, they made up rules and complex models deliberately to obfuscate logic so that even the best educated who were not in their little club would accept their dictums unquestioned.

Too bad Gordon Brown didn't seem to pick that up in the advice JK gave him.